Jim Bradshaw: Is it turkey in the oven or crawfish in the pot?

Most people begin to think about a big Thanksgiving turkey and the dishes that go with it when the calendar changes from October to November, but in South Louisiana we also turn our thoughts to crawfish.
We’ve  been eating them for a long time, but the idea of a Thanksgiving crawfish boil is a relatively new thing. In my younger days, you couldn’t get them this time of year, and you had to live close to where they were caught to get them at any time. Crawfish were only caught wild, mostly in the spring and summer in the Atchafalaya Basin, and there wasn’t much incentive for fishermen to catch them at all.
The first commercial harvest was in 1880, when 23,400 pounds were sold for a grand total of $2,140. By 1908, the harvest had grown to 88,000 pounds valued at $3,600. That’s not even a half-penny per pound, and prices didn’t get much higher for a good while.
By the 1920s crawfish were up to only 4 cents a pound, but things began to change a little bit. Better transportation and cold storage began to expand the market to Baton Rouge, New Orleans and other cities relatively close to the Basin. But there still weren’t many places outside of South Louisiana interested, or even aware, of the little critters that would one day help make us famous.
Biologist Percy Viosca was one of the first to promote raising crawfish in ponds. He wrote about it in the 1930s, but it was 1950 before the Legislature gave the Wildlife and Fisheries Commission a little money to look into the idea. That study found a handful of South Louisiana farmers who were reflooding their fields after the rice harvest, but they were catching just enough crawfish for their own consumption, not for sale.
The idea of farming crawfish began to spread across South Louisiana in the1960s. By 1965, South Louisiana sported 10,000 acres of managed ponds. They produced enough crawfish for a fledgling picking and packing industry to begin, and that led to more aggressive marketing both inside and outside the state. Since then, crawfish farming has become big business. We catch 150 million pounds or more in a good year, with an annual impact in Louisiana of more than $300 million.
I’m not sure whether the industry’s success stemmed from the fact that the crawfish became an iconic symbol of South Louisiana, or whether it was the other way around and the crawfish became a symbol because of the success of the farms. Breaux Bridge native Sam Irwin suggested in his book about the industry ("Louisiana Crawfish: A Succulent History of the Cajun Crustacean," The History Press, 2014), that they grew together: “Everything about Cajuns was considered cool. People were drawn to that Cajun vibe, or joie de vivre, and what’s more Cajun than crawfish?”
However it grew, we now eat more crawfish grown in ponds than in the wild. Those ponds are usually harvested from the fall through early spring. That is our good fortune, because we now have two crawfish “crops” — wild in the spring and summer, pond-raised in fall and winter — giving us fresh crawfish practically all year long, albeit some years are better than others.
The good news is that this season may be better than it has been for the last several years, when drought and heat caused major setbacks for our crawfish farmers, and we saw fewer crawfish and higher prices. But things look better for the coming harvest.
LSU AgCenter specialists say this summer’s rains and more moderate temperatures helped young crawfish survive, and that about 400,000 acres have been dedicated to ponds this year, which is up from last year. That raises our hope that there will be more crawfish for our pots, but they still could be pricy.
Farmers had double trouble in recent seasons. They had fewer crawfish to sell but had to pay more for fuel, electricity, bait, labor, traps, everything, and won’t see much of a drop in their expenses this year. That means prices may not moderate as much as we hope, if at all.
But, whatever the price, we are now faced with the pleasant seasonal dilemma of choosing turkey in the oven or crawfish in the pot. Or maybe not. Who says we can’t have both?
How about a crawfish stuffing for the big bird?
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.